In a typical telecommunications system, also referred to as a wireless communication system, User Equipments (UEs), communicate via a Radio Access Network (RAN) to one or more Core Networks (CNs).
A user equipment is a terminal by which a subscriber can access services offered by an operator's core network. The user equipments, sometimes also referred to as Mobile Stations (MS) may be for example communication devices such as mobile telephones, cellular telephones, laptops or tablet computers, sometimes referred to as surf plates, with wireless capability. The user equipments may be portable, pocket-storable, hand-held, computer-comprised, or vehicle-mounted mobile devices, enabled to communicate voice and/or data, via the radio access network, with another entity, such as another mobile station or a server. A user equipment may also be stationary devices or machines that communicate via the RAN.
User equipments are enabled to communicate wirelessly in the telecommunications system. The communication may be performed e.g. between two user equipments, between a user equipment and a regular telephone and/or between the user equipment and a server via the radio access network and possibly one or more core networks, comprised within the telecommunications system.
The telecommunications system covers a geographical area which is divided into cell areas. Each cell area is served by a base station, which sometimes may be referred to as e.g. a Radio Base Station (RBS), or a BTS (Base Transceiver Station), depending on the technology and terminology used.
The base stations may be of different classes such as e.g. macro base station or pico base station, based on transmission power and thereby also on cell size.
A cell is the geographical area where radio coverage is provided by the base station at a base station site. One base station, situated on the base station site, may serve one or several cells. Further, each base station may support one or several communication technologies.
The base stations communicate over the air interface operating on radio frequencies with the user equipments within range of the base stations.
In some radio access networks, sometimes referred to as a radio network, several base stations may be connected, e.g. by landlines or microwave, to a radio network controller, e.g. a Radio Network Controller (RNC) in Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), and/or to each other.
The radio network controller, also sometimes termed a Base Station Controller (BSC) e.g. in GSM, may supervise and coordinate various activities of the plural base stations connected thereto. GSM is an abbreviation for Global System for Mobile Communications (originally: Groupe Special Mobile).
In 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE), base stations, which may be referred to as eNodeBs or eNBs, may be directly connected to one or more core networks.
UMTS is a third generation, 3G, mobile communication system, which evolved from the second generation, 2G, mobile communication system GSM, and is intended to provide improved mobile communication services based on Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) access technology. UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) is essentially a radio access network using WCDMA for user equipments. The 3GPP has undertaken to evolve further the UTRAN and GSM based radio access network technologies.
A Base Station Subsystem (BSS) which will be referred to in this disclosure is an example of a radio network, and is sometimes also referred to as a base station system.
The BSS comprises BSS nodes, such as a BSC and one or several BTSs.
General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) and Evolved GPRS (EGPRS) refer to platforms for packet orientated mobile services, wherein data is sent in so called data packets between the various nodes in the telecommunications system.
GPRS is a best-effort service, implying variable throughput and latency that depend on the number of mobile stations using the service concurrently.
The concept of Quality of Sevice (QoS) provides means for provisioning the BSS with a set of attributes that should be used to describe a service to achieve efficient resource utilization while maintaining the end to end service requirements.
The number of services utilizing GSM EGPRS networks is constantly increasing since the introduction of the so called smart phone. The services characteristics impose different requirements on the RAN to ensure efficient resource utilization while at the same time ensuring the differentiation between the user equipments on shared resources such as the Packet Data Channels (PDCH). With the introduction of different Machine Type of Communication (MTC) devices that run services through the GSM EGPRS networks, the service characteristics that are required will be even more differentiated. MTC is seen as a form of data communication which involves one or more entities that do not necessarily need human interaction.
A problem is however, that the large multiplicity of services and the limitation of the QoS attributes limit the possibilities provided by the QoS concept.